Lu Heintz
[adrotate banner=”15″]
Lu Heintz is an artist, educator, and feminist collaborator currently based in Providence, RI. She holds a BFA in Sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Additional education includes studies at Penland School of Crafts (NC), Haystack Mountain School (ME), Ox-Bow School of Art (MI), and CE.CA.TI (Michoacán, Mexico). She has been awarded residencies at MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center and Arts, Letters & Numbers (NY), and has received awards from the National Endowment of the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, the International Sculpture Center and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She balances her artistic endeavors with a commitment to feminist pedagogy and scholarship and is an Associate Artist Researcher for the Digital Institute of Early Parenthood (UK). Social practices include collaboratively edited, independently published magazines; farming and food preservation; mutual aid; non-institutional educational outreach such as workshops and mentoring; feminist Wikipedia editing and intersectional feminist reading groups. She teaches in the Division of Experimental and Foundation Studies at RISD and is actively engaged in many community-based art organizations. Her work has exhibited nationally and internationally in museums and galleries including: the RISD Museum, the National Ornamental
Metals Museum, R.K. Projects, Brood Film Fest and Sarah Doyle Gallery. She is a member of WARP, a textile-based studio collective in located in Atlantic Mills, Providence. My work is personal, but it is not necessarily about me. The personal is a conceptual realm I investigate through everyday materials, experiences and exchanges. Personhood is a position tensioned between constructed expectations and individual agency, a juncture bonded by language. I make conceptually driven work examining, translating and remaking this language- in visual, sensorial, textual and material terms. My practice is transdisciplinary, finding many points of entry- textiles, metalsmithing, sculpture, video, sound, installation, performance, paper works, and writing- with a dedicated tendency towards the confluence of technique and meaning. The material techniques become language, and while the materials may be common, so remains the gravity of my everyday questions around power, gender, labor, consumerism, intimacy, communication, and silence.
